Are hydrocarbons "renewable"- and if so- what does such a conclusion
mean for the future of the world's oil and natural gas supplies?

The question is critical due to the enormous amount of coverage the
issue of "Peak Oil" is receiving from the mainstream press. If the supply
of hydrocarbons is renewable- then the contrary to the conventional wisdom
being touted throughout the mainstream press today- the world is NOT running
out of oil.

Unbeknownst to Westerners, there have actually been for quite some time
now two competing theories concerning the origins of petroleum. One theory
claims that oil is an organic 'fossil fuel' deposited in finite quantities
near the planet's surface. The other theory claims that oil is continuously
generated by natural processes in the Earth's magma.

One of the world's leading advocates for the theory that hydrocarbons
are renewable is Dr. Thomas Gold who contends that oil is not a limited
resource, and that oil, natural gas and coal, are not so-called ďfossil
fuels.Ē

In his book, The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels, he explains
that dinosaurs and plants and the fossils from those living beings are
not the origin of oil and natural gas, but rather generated from a chemical
substance in the crust of the Earth.

Dr. Gold: "Astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as
oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They
are a common substance in the universe. You find it in the kind of gas
clouds that made systems like our solar system. You find large quantities
of hydrocarbons in them. Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth,
one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own
and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when
they were born? That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didnít
have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas?"

He continues: "Human skull fossils have been found in anthracite coal
in Pennsylvania. The official theory of the development of coal will not
accept that reality, since human beings were not around when anthracite
coal was formed. Coal was formed millions of years ago. However, you cannot
mistake the fact that these are human fossils."

"The coal we dig is hard, brittle stuff. It was once a liquid, because
we find embedded in the middle of a six-foot seam of coal such things as
a delicate wing of some animal or a leaf of a plant. They are undestroyed,
absolutely preserved; with every cell in that fossil filled with exactly
the same coal as all the coal on the outside. A hard, brittle coal is not
going to get into each cell of a delicate leaf without destroying it. So
obviously that stuff was a thin liquid at one time which gradually hardened."

Gold claims that the only thing we find now on the Earth that would
do that is petroleum, which gradually becomes stiffer and harder. That
is the only logical explanation for the origin of coal. So the fact that
coal contains fossils does not prove that it is a fossil fuel; it proves
exactly the opposite. Those fossils found in coal prove that coal is not
made from those fossils. Where then does the carbon base come from that
produces all of this?

Says Dr. Gold: "Petroleum and coal were made from materials in which
heavy hydrocarbons were common components. We know that because the meteorites
are the sort of debris left over from the formations of the planets and
those contain carbon in unoxidized form as hydrocarbons as oil and coal-like
particles. We find that in one large class of meteorites and we find that
equally on many of the other planetary bodies in the solar system. So itís
pretty clear that when the Earth formed it contained a lot of carbon material
built into it."

Dr. Gold's ideas would lead us to believe that there is so much natural
gas in the earth that it is causing earthquakes in trying to escape from
the Earth. If youíll drill deep enough anywhere, you will find natural
gas. It may not be in commercial quantities every time, but more than likely
it will be.

Is the oil and gas industry reconsidering things in light of his work?

Absolutely not.

"In many other countries they are listening to me: in Russia on a very
large scale, and in China also. It is just Western Europe and the United
States that are so stuck in the mud that they canít look at anything else."

What do the Russians know that the West don't?
The roots of Dr. Gold's theories are in Russia where scientists since
the end World War II have been researching what is referred to as the "Modern
Russian-Ukrainian Theory of Deep, Abiotic Petroleum Origins."

Although the theory was first expounded upon by Professor Nikolai Kudryavtsev
in 1951 it is not the work of any one single man but has been developed
by hundreds of scientists in the (now former) U.S.S.R..

The theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins is not a vague, qualitative
hypothesis, but stands as a rigorous analytic theory within the mainstream
of the modern physical sciences. In this respect, the modern theory differs
fundamentally not only from the previous hypothesis of a biological origin
of petroleum but also from all traditional geological hypotheses.

Actually, since the nineteenth century, knowledgeable physicists, chemists,
thermodynamicists, and chemical engineers have regarded with grave reservations
(if not outright disdain) the suggestion that highly reduced hydrocarbon
molecules of high free enthalpy (the constituents of crude oil) might somehow
evolve spontaneously from highly oxidized biogenic molecules of low free
enthalpy. Beginning in 1964, Soviet scientists carried out extensive theoretical
statistical thermodynamic analysis which established explicitly that the
hypothesis of evolution of hydrocarbon molecules (except methane) from
biogenic ones in the temperature and pressure regime of the Earth's near-surface
crust was glaringly in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

The theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins is presently applied extensively
throughout the former U.S.S.R. as the guiding perspective for petroleum
exploration and development projects. There are presently more than 80
oil and gas fields in the Caspian district alone which were explored and
developed by applying the perspective of the modern theory and which produce
from the crystalline basement rock.

Similarly, such exploration in the western Siberia cratonic-rift sedimentary
basin has developed 90 petroleum fields of which 80 produce either partly
or entirely from the crystalline basement. The exploration and discoveries
of the 11 major and 1 giant fields on the northern flank of the Dneiper-Donets
basin have already been noted. There are presently deep drilling exploration
projects under way in Azerbaijan, Tatarstan, and Asian Siberia directed
to testing potential oil and gas reservoirs in the crystalline basement.

Is "Peak Oil" a fraud?
So why is the western media being inundated with notions of the world
running out of oil?

One could point a finger at the multinational oil companies and their
vested interest in having the price of a barrel of oil rise substantially-
to justify further exploration expenses- and of course- to bolster their
bottom line.

Says Dr. J.F. Kenney, a long-time research on the origins of hydrocarbons:

"For almost a century, various predictions have been made that the human
race was imminently going to run out of available petroleum. The passing
of time has proven all those predictions to have been utterly wrong. It
is pointed out here how all such predictions have depended fundamentally
upon an archaic hypothesis from the 18th century that petroleum somehow
(miraculously) evolved from biological detritus, and was accordingly limited
in abundance."

That hypothesis has been replaced during the past forty years by the
modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of abyssal, abiotic petroleum origins which
has established that petroleum is a primordial material erupted from great
depth. Therefore, according to Kenney, petroleum abundances are limited
by little more than the quantities of its constituents as were incorporated
into the Earth at the time of its formation.

As far back as 1757, in his address at the Imperial Academy of Sciences
in St. Petersburg, Academician Mikhailo V. Lomonosov, stated:

"Rock oil originates as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments
which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting
during an unimaginably long period of time, transform into rock oil [petroleum
, or crude oil]"

More than 200 years later, Professor Emmanuil Chekaliuk told the conference
on Petroleum and Petroleum Geology in Moscow that:

"Statistical thermodynamic analysis has established clearly that hydrocarbon
molecules which comprise petroleum require very high pressures for their
spontaneous formation, comparable to the pressures required for the same
of diamond. In that sense, hydrocarbon molecules are the high-pressure
polymorphs of the reduced carbon system as is diamond of elemental carbon.
Any notion which might suggest that hydrocarbon molecules spontaneously
evolve in the regimes of temperature and pressure characterized by the
near-surface of the Earth, which are the regimes of methane creation and
hydrocarbon destruction, does not even deserve consideration."

Contrarily, the statistics of the international petroleum industry establish
that, far from diminishing, the net known recoverable reserves of petroleum
have been growing steadily for the past fifty years. Those statistics show
that, for every year since about 1946, the international petroleum industry
has discovered at least five new tons of recoverable oil for every three
which have been consumed.

As Professor P. Odell of the London School of Economics has put it,
instead of "running out of oil," the human race by every measure seems
to be "running into oil".

Says Dr. Kenney: "There stands no reason to worry about, and even less
to plan for, any predicted demise of the petroleum industry based upon
a vanishing of petroleum reserves. On the contrary, these considerations
compel additional investment and development in the technology and skills
of deep drilling, of deep seismic measurement and interpretation, of the
reservoir properties of crystalline rock, and of the associated completion
and production practices which should be applied in such non-traditional
reservoirs"

If Kenney is correct, not only are any predictions that the world is
"running out of oil" invalid, so also are suggestions that the petroleum
exploration and production industry is a "mature" or "declining" one.

The impact on the planet of the conclusions of this debate
Much research remains to be done on "alternative" theories of the how
much hydrocarbons are left in the world- unfortunately- those entities
most able to do this research- the western multinational oil conglomerates-
have the least interest in arriving at any conclusion other than those
that are part of the "Peak Oil" stream of thought. Today the mainstream
press has accepted as a given that the world has only a finite amount of
oil and natural gas- and thus any decision taken on how to deal with the
world's future needs are based on these conclusions. If they are erroneous-
then the world is about to embark on a plan to provide for its energy needs
for the coming century based on a false notion.

Research geochemist Michael Lewan of the U.S.Geological Survey in Denver,
is one of the most knowledgeable advocates of the opposing theory, that
petroleum is a "fossil fuel". Yet even Lewan admits:

"I don't think anybody has ever doubted that there is an inorganic source
of hydrocarbons. The key question is, 'Do they exist in commercial quantities?'"

We might never know the answer to that question because both sides of
this debate are not being heard by the general public. If the Russians
have accepted the theory that hydrocarbons are renewable- and over time
they will become the leading exporters of oil and gas worldwide- this fact
alone requires these alternative theories of how fossil fuels are created-
is required.

It behooves western governments to begin taking these alternative theories
seriously- and design future energy policies based on possibility that
they are correct. Whatever strategies for meeting the world's ferocious
appetite for energy are devised today- will impact the planet for decades
to come.